We have seen that the "crux of the question" facing Russia is correctly identified by the French reactionary Chalas, cited by Mr. Milyukov, as the agrarian question[5].

Mr. Milyukov cited the intelligent words of an intelligent reactionary, but understood absolutely nothing in them!

"…Can that peasant whom you (i.e., the Octobrists and the government: Mr. Milyukov is conversing with them!) brought here with your own hands – can you make him dependent? After all, he speaks of land from this very rostrum and speaks the same as the independent peasant spoke in the I and II State Dumas. No, gentlemen, no, there is no element in Russian life more independent and more steadfast than the Russian peasant." (Applause from the left and voices: "That's right!")

Evidently, it was only the hypocritical Kadets who applauded, for it is well known to all that, first, in the III and IV State Dumas the peasants speak not quite "the same," but more weakly, than in the I and II State Dumas – and, second, that in Russian life there exists an element more independent and more steadfast. Mr. Milyukov himself was forced to acknowledge in his speech that the workers had done "the most" for political freedom in Russia. Or can "independence" be measured by a different standard?

But that is not the essence of the matter. The essence is this: are the interests of 130,000 landowners and the masses of peasants now reconcilable? Mr. Milyukov "babbled around" this question in order to evade an answer.

And Mr. S. Litovtsev, hired by "Rech" to praise P. Milyukov, wrote that his speech

"dispersed the fog surrounding this acute and controversial question. Universal suffrage still appears to many as some kind of bugbear, the height of revolutionariness."

Here again is yet another specimen of phrasemaking!

Learn from the reactionary Chalas, you liberal windbags! The crux of the question is the agrarian question. Are the interests of 130,000 families of landowners and 10,000,000 families of peasants now reconcilable on this question? Yes or no?

There is the "crux" of the question of universal suffrage, Mr. Milyukov, and you are corrupting the political consciousness of the people, muddying the essence of the matter with phrases, though it is obvious to any intelligent person.

If you answer the question: yes – I shall refute you by your own admission that in the III and IV State Dumas the peasants speak (though more weakly) "the same" as in the I and II State Dumas.

If you answer the question: no – then your entire talk about the conciliatory, not "one-sided" character of universal suffrage in present-day Russia collapses.

And learned references to Bismarck – that is mere childishness, for Bismarck "granted" universal suffrage only when the interests of landowners and all well-to-do, even part of the middle, peasants had already been reconciled by the bourgeois development of Germany.

Perhaps the perspicacious reader will ask: does it not follow from this that universal suffrage is impossible in Russia? – No, we answer the perspicacious reader, it follows only that a reformist point of view is impossible in Russia.

"Pravda" No. 56, March 8, 1913. Signature: V. I.

Printed from the text of the newspaper "Pravda"